Background and Motivation

• Not all rushing yards are equal

• Traditional stats miss the “how” behind yards gained

• Previous research has explored athletes reaching theoretical max capacity ¹

• Can we “measure” effort using tracking data?

• Multiple ways of evaluating effort

  • Intangible and subjective
  • Depends on player position, defense faced, game context, snap count/play volume, play call/assignment

Our Data: 2022 NFL Season

• Game, play, player, tracking data from Weeks 1-9 ¹

• Running plays where a running back (RB) is the ball carrier

• Trimmed each play to frames between handoff and end of play

Motivation: acceleration-speed (AS) profiles tell us about players’ acceleration capacities at different speeds

Effort is defined as the percentage of points above the relaxed line

• Biased toward backups because of lower sample size.. or are they just working harder after all? Are starters fatigued or pacing themselves?

• Unrealistic theoretical max speeds

Plan of action

• Define research question and scope ✅

• Data cleaning and preprocessing, EDA ✅

• Select effort metric(s)

• Evaluate effort metric(s) by correlating it to effort-related outcomes

• Use chosen metric(s) to answer questions related to effort (residual effort, tackle outcome probabilities, minimum required effort per play, etc)